Edimax Wifi Adapter Problem


 

Ben Crocker

New member
Just recently built a second HM board to give to a friend. I tested the HM board by substituting in my working system, configured it for his wireless, and sent him home with the board and an SD card. He ordered the Edimax adapter, the RPi, power supply etc to finish out the project.

When he put it all together at his house, everything worked except the wifi. The Edimax adapter never blinks, and the system cannot connect to wireless or even scan for wireless networks. HMrPI works as expected when standalone or when connected though a hardwired network connection.

So he brought the machine from Austin to Houston to see if we could figure out the problem. I first put his Edimax wifi in my working HMrPi and it would not connect to wireless. If I put my Edimax wifi in his HMrPI it works fine. So we assumed a bad Edimax adapter and he ordered another. The new one arrived and he still has the same problem, the adapter never blinks on startup and from the configuration screen appears to be dead. To troubleshoot he plugged the Edimax into a PC. It was recognized it brought down the Edimax drivers and works fine, including blinking to show connectivity.

I've confirmed that it is the Edimax 150M version EW-7811Un. Anyone have thoughts on what to do next ? Is this perhaps a new revision which requires a new driver ?
 
He can download a rPi image, write it to sd and see if that will load the wifi adapter. If that works, then I would assume that the openwrt driver needs to be updated.

dave
 
If you set up the wifi with your adapter, the configuration is tied to that specific adapter. OpenWrt does this by default, which is sort of annoying for folks like me with a bunch of these devices and you just want to plug in a wifi adapter and GOOOOOOO.

The easiest thing to do if he's on LinkMeter v7 is to just plug in a keyboard and execute `wifi-client [ssid] [password]`. If he's had it for a couple of weeks, then it is slightly more complicated
Code:
uci delete wireless.radio0.macaddr
uci set wireless.radio0.phy=phy0
uci commit wireless
sync
reboot
EDIT: Or something like that. I can't say for sure without blowing away my configuration to get the exact commands. The important point being you have to remove the macaddr and add phy = phy0 for radio0.
 
Last edited:
Bryan, that sounds like the issue. I'll move him up to V7 then update the wifi per your instructions.

Thanks - this was getting frustrating !
 

 

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